I’ll open today with the results from Monday’s “Moron of the Month” competition.
This one elicited a lot of great responses, including references to Joe Dirt and the Heatmeister, and many funny references to the shortcomings of all three contestants. And unlike last week’s nominations from the Eastern Division, when Lashes Crockett left the other nominees in the dust, this one was close.
Not counting the readers who said they couldn’t choose, or that it was a three-way tie, Elie “Fat Albert” Mystal took the dunce cap, with 18 votes, to corrupt Tania’s 13 and Griesa’s “Come and get me, I’m an enormous, unashamed, queer illegal!” 7-vote-winning strategy.
So Mystal advances from the Western division. I’ll hold off until toward the end of the month to choose the three nominees from both the Southern and Northern divisions, and then we’ll have a “Moron-off” among the Final Four.
Meanwhile, other boneheads have stepped forward to give me fodder for one of my traditional categories: “We Don’t Hate the Media Enough.”
The first example one comes from the story you probably heard about last week, in which a female fencer refused to compete against a male, and was disqualified for it.
The male, Redmond Sullivan –a violator of Simpson’s Rule of Life #146: Never trust someone with two last names – fenced last year as a male, and came in 29th in his last competition. (I’m assuming that that was out of no more than 30 competitors, tops.) But when he switched to “female,” he won.
UNEXPECTEDLY!
Many media outlets called him a “transgender woman,” as well as “her” and “she.” Because of course they did. But the outlet that took the prize – I think it’s called “Sports Grail,” but that might just be the site that repeated this – used this headline: “Fencer disqualified after she refused to fence with someone she believed is transgender.”
Ugh. She doesn’t “believe” the dude to be “transgender.” She believes him to be a male. Because…wait for it… He’s. A. Male! You idiots!
(I would also have accepted the headline, “Fencer disqualified after she refused to fence with a male who wrongly claims to be transgender.”)
The next example comes to us from CBS. (UNEXPECTEDLY!) And it follows a pattern I saw many times in my teaching years.
Before they took my class, many of my students had been propagandized to believe that all indigenous peoples were noble proto-environmentalists, living in Edenic conditions of peace and love until the wicked Europeans invaded and colonized their lands, teaching them the evil ways of capitalism and the Judeo-Christian world view. So it was my job to teach them true things that they’d never heard of before.
Things like, “If we were to give the Black Hills back to the Indians who lived there before whitey showed up, should we give it to the Sioux, or to the tribe that the Sioux slaughtered and stole it from, or to the tribe from whom that tribe had stolen it, etc.?
And, “If the descendants of white southern Democrats who owned slaves should pay reparations, should the black Africans who captured those slaves in the interior of Africa and then took them to the coast and sold them to Arabs or Europeans also be forced to pay reparations? And speaking of the Arabs, how much should they pony up, since they took many more slaves than the Europeans did?”
Then I’d casually mention that Slavic people and the Welsh – who are both almost as white as Liz Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher) – were actually some of the most enslaved people in olden times. The word “slave” comes from the word “slav,” and “Wales” and “Welsh” come from a Germanic root meaning “slave.” Anglo-Saxons in western England owned more slaves than those in eastern England, because the west was closer to Wales, where the welsh/slaves were conveniently nearby.
By that point, the more leftish among my students had either curled into a fetal ball and were crying, or else had turned into a toxic combination of Greta Thunberg and Cotton Mather, and stood pointing at me, and with blazing eyes, yelled, “How dare you? The white man lies!”
But enough about me, and my pedagogical fantastic-ness.
I was reminded of those classes when I saw CBS’ report on a recent discovery of an altar in Guatemala that dates back to Mayan times. The archaeologist who made the discovery reported that the bodies of three young children were found there, and concluded that the site had been used for child sacrifices.
Now CBS could have stopped right there. But then the network would be just “C.” But you can’t have CBS without the “BS.”
So they found an “expert” to parachute in and correct any impression that perhaps the altar builders might have had just a dusting of “bloodthirsty child murdering” along with all of their lovely, indigenous ways.
Enter Maria Belen Mendez – she has three accents over the vowels in her name, so you know that she’s super credible – who is identified as “an archaeologist who was not involved with the project” says that the nasty stuff at the altar was actually just a part of the native religion’s reverence for the sun and moon:
“[The child sacrifice] was a practice; it’s not that they were violent, it was their way of connecting with the celestial bodies.” (You hear similar claims about the Aztec festivals during which the mostly peaceful brown folks ripped the hearts out of their living victims, or beheaded them by the thousands, and then rolled the heads down the steps of their temples…. But only because they wanted to ensure a good harvest, you see.)
Ummm…. I’m no child-sacrifice-ologist, but I’m pretty sure that whatever else you might say about people who murdered toddlers on an altar, you can’t credibly say, “it’s not that they were violent…”
By the way, do you think these cultural apologists would EVER say, “It’s not that the torturers of the Spanish Inquisition were violent. They just REALLY wanted to find out who the heretics were.”
They would not.
And we don’t hate them enough.
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 